Curio 10

Professional brainstorming, mind mapping, and note taking for the Mac.

With Curio you’ll discover an intuitive, freeform environment with all the integrated tools you need to take notes, brainstorm ideas, collect research, and organize your tasks and documents.
A single, incredibly powerful application where you can be more productive and focus on getting things done.
And, with Curio 10, new tools and features are at your fingertips so you can achieve even more.

What’s Curio?

Curio is a professional, feature-rich environment for brainstorming, note taking, and research gathering.

The Real World

You have work projects and home projects, school classes to manage and book reports to research, vacations to plan and novels to write, web sites to design and lab results to organize.

You currently use a collection of notebooks, your office whiteboard, scraps of sticky notes, oodles of browser bookmarks, and multiple documents scattered around your hard disk.

You’re juggling it all, but organizing this information should be easier.

A Better World!

In Curio, create a project to represent your real-world project, then fill it with everything related to that project including notes, images, documents, web links, and much, much more.
Use Curio’s integrated collections, such as lists and mind maps, to organize all of this information or just place it anywhere on Curio’s freeform pages, which we call idea spaces.

Anything placed into Curio can be associated with tags, flags, checkboxes, priorities, ratings, and start/due dates and durations, for fast and easy searching and task management.

The best part is you are in complete control over your idea spaces.
Make them sloppy or organized, freeform or in a grid—this is your project notebook.
This is called visual thinking and perfectly mirrors your real-world notebooks and whiteboards so you are instantly comfortable in Curio’s intuitive environment.

Thousands of customers around the world use Curio in a surprisingly diverse range of occupations.
We have students and professors, engineers and designers, lawyers and writers, entrepreneurs and filmmakers, all using Curio for information gathering, brainstorming, and creative exploration.

Curio for Note Taking

Curio is an amazingly flexible digital notebook for storing and managing everything.

We call Curio’s innovative pages idea spaces—a perfect blend of notepaper, whiteboard, and sketchpad.
You can type anywhere, sketch anywhere, and drag-and-drop anything to your idea spaces making it a perfect tool for note taking and research gathering.

Curio for Brainstorming

The ultimate brainstorming and idea development environment.

Curio’s tightly integrated brainstorming tools are the perfect complement to its notebook interface.
Since these tools are built-in, you don’t have to purchase another application to expand on a thought or idea.

“If you’re already using a previous version of Curio, go get this new update.”— Macworld

“I have yet to review a better, friendlier, or more powerful tool for taking on any project under the sun.”— Macworld

“Taken together, Curio is one fast-loading, responsive package with fantastic potential and tons of flexibility.”— MacLife

“If you haven’t tried Curio before, now is the time.”9/10— Mac.AppStorm

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What’s New in Curio 10?

Everything you need to be even more productive.

Curiota

Curiota is a fantastic new — free — companion app that integrates with and extends Curio 10’s functionality and connectivity, available as a separate download exclusively from the Apple Mac App Store.

Instant note and file collection at any time

Curiota runs silently in the background, using very little memory and almost no user interface except for its icon up in the menu bar area.

Tap Curiota’s icon and quick add a rich note to Curiota.
Or drag-and-drop files and images to the Curiota icon to instantly add items to your Curiota collection.

Curiota also supports OS X Services, the OS X Share button, Save PDF to Curiota, a browser bookmarklet, and even AppleScript so you can easily send information from anywhere into Curiota, and therefore into Curio.

Integrates with Curio

Then, within Curio 10, you'll use the new Local library shelf to view and search through all your collected data.

Curiota is available as a separate download so we can update its functionality much more rapidly than Curio’s release cycle.
Expect lots of new features and updates coming soon!

Stacks

Visual organization

Create an idea space with one or more stacks.
Each stack can be used to organize your tasks, ideas, and brainstorming notes into categories or groupings that you define.
Create stacks like "Ideas", "Pending", "Next" and "Done!"; or "Wedding Rehearsal", "Ceremony", "Reception".
Double-click within a stack to create new items or drag-and-drop items between stacks.

Manually arrange or auto sort

You can drag items up and down within the stack, to manually prioritize your items, or ask Curio to keep the stack automatically sorted by title, creation date, modification date, due date, start date, start date or end date if already started, percent completed, priority, or rating. You can specify a secondary sort, as well.
Make a change to a figure and instantly the figures rearrange based on the sorting rule.

Tagging super power

In addition, stacks support a special tagging feature so simply drag-and-dropping tasks from one stack to another will automatically update associated tags behind the scenes and reflect the changed task status in the Status shelf.
Truly visual task tracking!

Polished Interface

The user interface has a more refined experience with new Style, Text, Pinboard, Album, and Index Card inspector shelf panels; modernized inspector bar icons; a more intuitive Status shelf icon indicator; a Zoom toolbar popup; more responsive pinch gesture support for zooming; and calmer inspector colorings.

Mind Map & List Sorting

By popular request, both mind map and list collections can now have automatically sorted branches!

Select a parent node in either a list or mind map then choose to sort by title, creation date, modification date, due date, start date, start date or end date if already started, percent completed, priority, or rating.
You can optionally specify a secondary sort criteria, as well.

Once set up, the children of the selected node will be instantly sorted, and kept sorted as you change the figures.
You can also specify that the sorting criteria is recursive so child branches are also kept sorted.

iMindMap & MindNode Support

We have also improved Curio’s existing MindNode compatibility with support for zipped MindNode data files and the MindNode 2 format.
In addition, Curio includes support for MindNode’s OPML output.

Table Enhancements

Fit and distribute

By very popular demand, Curio tables can now size row and column cells to fit their content.
Select either the table or selected cells and use the new Fit button to tell Curio to resize the rows or columns, so they fit the contents of the tallest, or widest, cell.

Similarly, Curio can now evenly distribute the heights or widths of the selected rows or columns (or all rows or columns) so they each have the same value.

Better resizing

Resizing rows and columns is now easier as the table will now be resized as you resize the row or column.
This makes it much easier to size your cells exactly the way you like.

Tag Emoji

You can now associate an emoji or Unicode symbol with a tag!

Tag images are still supported, but unlike most images, emoji scale beautifully, consume very little disk space, and OS X includes loads of them!
For these reasons, all of Curio’s bundled tag images have been converted to emoji and many new Flags have been added.

If you choose a Unicode symbol, instead of a colored emoji, you can specify a tinting color.
As an example, notice the Down Time’s arrow is colored red in the screenshot here.

On a related note, we also made some changes that make it easier to share projects that use global tag sets.

Local Library Shelf

The Local library uses the power of Spotlight to quickly find files on your hard disk using a number of criteria including text, tags, modification date, and kind of file.

You can direct Local to search your entire Mac, or restrict the scope to your Home folder and any folders it contains.
Even better, you can extend this with additional custom scope folders.
For example, you might add your Dropbox folder, your Google Drive folder, and a personal project folder.

The Local scope popup will also list all the notes and files found in your Curiota collections.

Example Uses

List all notes added to Curiota, sorted by last modified date.

Find all image files modified in the past 2 weeks.

Find all files with a tag "school" created in the past month.

Find all files in your ~/Dropbox/Research folder, sorted by last modified date, so you can quickly see your latest research notes that you filed away using your iPad.

Find all files added recently to your custom "inbox" folder.

Stencils Library Shelf

Curio has a Stencils shelf for those customers that use a lot of figure stencils, so you can easily drag-and-drop figure stencils into your idea space.

The new shelf support both simple stencils, containing just a single figure or grouped figure, and complex stencils, which can consist of multiple figures, such as a landscaping stencil.

Example Uses

Boilerplate text items of various font size and shape enclosures.

Various types of lines and arrows drawn using different colors and endpoint styles.

Geographic maps.

Floor plan or interior design elements.

Network diagram elements.

User interface design elements.

Website design elements.

Organizer Aliases

You can now create aliases to idea spaces or other Organizer items within the Organizer.
So, for example, you can now easily create a folder of idea space aliases pointing to idea spaces scattered throughout your project.

YouTube and Vimeo Video

It is now incredibly easy to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos in your idea spaces.
Simply drag-and-drop the URL to the video file and Curio will automatically create the necessary WebView, set up the URL, and make the resulting figure proportionally resizable for easy resizing.

This makes it incredibly easy to include reference or instructional videos in with your projects.

Updated for El Capitan and Sierra

Curio 10 runs on OS X Yosemite, El Capitan, or macOS Sierra as its codebase has been massively updated to use Apple’s latest frameworks as well as the latest versions of several 3rd party frameworks.

A Personal Note

I’ve always been a huge fan of taking notes, sketching out ideas, and brainstorming.
In the past, my notebooks and whiteboards were covered with notes, to-do lists, interface sketches, and much more.
I made sure my office had the largest whiteboard possible.

Over 10 years ago, during the development of Curio, the goal was to create a notebook app specifically for designers and other creative types.
While working on the initial interface and feature set, it dawned on us that a completely freeform environment, much like the notebooks in our hands and the whiteboards around the room, was exactly what we needed to create and not just for designers but for everyone who takes notes and collects ideas.

Curio is now the most innovative application on the market for brainstorming, note-taking, and productivity and used by thousands of customers around the world.
With Curio we’ve created an environment where brilliant minds will find all the tools they need to develop their ideas and find inspiration.
It’s wonderful to see how people are using Curio and I, personally, have ditched the whiteboard and use Curio for all my visual thinking.
I look forward to the next 10 years of amazing Curio development.